Creating our Favors: Step 2 - Personalizing

On the weekend of our social, my parents stayed with us. The Sunday night I was in the dining room creating my expenses spreadsheet from the night before and my mother sat down to start on a project we had come up with on one of her previous visits.

Embroidering my Mr and my initials on the fabric squares for the favours.



She wasn't impressed with my impromptu photo shoot but I need to document theses things...right?!

I had printed off cross stitch patterns for our first initials, a heart and our wedding date but my mother sketched a few options and came up with this...

Originally we thought we could stick the lid over the fabric so that it would stay on properly, like above, but found that we would have to add padding under the fabric for the entire pattern to show up clearly.

We then tried the fabric over the lid and it seems to work a lot better. (I used an elastic under the raffia ribbon to hold the fabric in place better)

As for the stitching, we decided to just do a straight stitch on everything except the heart as we have approximately 200 of these puppies to do and it will go a lot faster.

After my mother completed the first one, she traced it on tissue paper and made a few copies as there is no way I can get these done by my self in the three months that I have left!

We decided to divide the project up into sets of 50's. My mother, sister, an awesome coworker of mine and I will each take one of the four colors and set to work.

I ended up with the dark blue material. Small problem...its too dark to see through, even over a bright light, making it near impossible to trace so I've been left free handing it...

As you can see the initials, heart and date came out okay but I had a really hard time free hand stitching the 'Spread the Love', especially getting it to curve. I've decided that I am going to do all of the hearts first, then the initials & date, and when that is done I figure I will have thought of a way to transfer the outline of 'Spread the Love' onto the pattern so I can stitch it properly.

I'm currently thinking a white pen or tailor's chalk may be the way to go. Suggestions?